‘Thought I was in for some trouble on the way over,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Came up over the Bazar Valley. Didn’t realize it was miles out of your search area so I was keeping an eye peeled on the way. Twenty miles back over Afridi territory I thought I’d spotted a smudge of smoke in the sky. Here,’ he pointed at the map. ‘Rather high and no sign on the ground. Dispersing fire? I diverted to get a closer look but then I caught a flash of sunlight on metal. Looked like the start of a helio signal to me but then I remembered where I was and thought, “Rifle barrel. Bloody hell! Afridis are up!” I did a few acrobatics and went on my way. No shots.’
‘Well, if that’s all clear,’ said Fred, rolling up the map, ‘we’ll be off. Coming, Joe? Hugh, old son, we’ll relieve you of your hats and goggles and stuff.’
Ten minutes later Joe was sitting nervously in the rear seat of the plane, which had been turned on its axis, watching as Fred with total confidence, enthusiasm even, fiddled with the controls, interminably carrying out checks. At last he was satisfied. ‘Switches off!’ he called to the flight sergeant standing by the propeller. Tommy Edwards swung the big blade of the propeller. ‘Contact, sir!’ he shouted back. ‘Contact!’
The twelve cylinder Rolls Royce engine, hardly cooled, fired up reassuringly at the first attempt. Fred waited, listening to the note and checking again the dials in front of him. He raised his hands above his head to signal for the chocks to be pulled away and two Scouts standing by obliged. He took a firm grip of the throttle and began to move slowly forward over the football pitch. Tommy saluted, rather unnecessarily Joe thought, to indicate that the sky was clear and the plane started forward, gathering speed. Fred pulled the joystick back and the machine swept gracefully up into the air.
Joe touched the folded sheet of paper tucked into his belt. Hugh had held it out to him the moment before he climbed into the plane. ‘Better have this with you, sir,’ he had said without emphasis. ‘We all carry one. Just in case.’
Joe had run an eye over the short script. In English and in Urdu the document declared that a very large amount of money would be handed by His Majesty’s Government to any person returning the bearer safe and sound. The better the condition of the airman, the larger the amount of money, it added. ‘More arithmetic on the frontier!’ Joe thought. He began to calculate the value of Fred’s experience and training, to say nothing of his own, adding on the cost of the aircraft and converting the sum into rupees in an effort to distract his mind from the terror he always felt when he left the safety of the ground. He checked his revolver. He familiarized himself with the two Lewis machine guns mounted to hand in the rear cockpit. There might be men in these hills who could not read either English or Urdu. Another problem was that the scheme of rewarding the tribesmen for delivering chaps back to base instead of killing them had given them an unexpected source of revenue and now any plane that flew overhead was seen as a legitimate target, a cash bonanza for the village. The number of planes lost in the ensuing turkey shoot had actually increased. As James said – how could you ever disentangle cause and effect in this country?
He looked at the man who now held his life in his hands. The jaunty tilt of Fred’s head told him that he, at least, was relishing the situation and Joe wondered again about the emotions, the compulsions even, that drove him. The skill and pleasure he showed in controlling this infernal flying machine were obviously high on the list and soon Fred’s confident handling of the noisy, bucking brute began to soothe Joe’s nerves. He thought perhaps he might relax so far as to release the two-handed grip on his seat with which he had unconsciously and futilely been attempting to keep the plane aloft.
Queasily, Joe looked over the side at the hills fought over so passionately for so many centuries. They had so little to offer and this was never more apparent than from a thousand feet up. Brown, barren, repellent, comfortless, he thought. In the distance green river valleys chequered with sugar cane fields and orchards only served to point up the desolation of the Tribal Territories. No wonder the inhabitants of this wilderness had made their living from raiding. Zan, zar, zamin – women, gold and land, and only available to those who were prepared to acquire a gun and use it to exact what they wanted.
Covering the port side, Joe swept the bare crags, all depth reduced from up here to ripples on a shingle-strewn sandy beach any one of which could be sheltering an invisible troop of thirty horsemen. In minutes they were overflying the Khyber Pass which snaked, dark and sinister, even from a height, making its tortuous way following the track of the rushing Khyber river for thirty miles. The only sign of life was a huge dust cloud beneath which nothing was discernible. The nomad Powindahs on the move towards the fort? Joe assumed so. The fort at Landi Kotal when they reached it was barely distinguishable from the surrounding khaki-coloured rocks but Joe was heartened to see a friendly signal flicker up at them from below as they flew over. They flew on right to the Durand Line marking, the extent of British claimed territory and, having no wish to start an international incident, Fred turned before he reached Afghanistan but not before they had a chance to survey from an even greater height the routes into the country. Still no sign of a troop of horsemen. Fred gave a thumbs down and signalled that he was about to turn for home.
Chapter Twelve
Lily, a few feet upstream of her horse, eagerly scooped up the ice-cold water and drank. That was the first and perhaps the most urgent of her needs attended to and now her mind was filled with the remaining two. She looked around her. The men seemed to have decided to settle down by the stream for a while. Lily noticed with interest their order of priority. First each had taken a small mat from his luggage and, kneeling on it, said his morning prayer, then they had attended to their horses and now at last they were turning their attention to unpacking promising-looking bundles from the pack mules. Breakfast? She walked tentatively through the developing encampment, leading her horse to join the others tethered some yards away. She noticed that each man as she drew level with him averted his eyes. In their own territory again presumably native rules applied once more and being a woman she became virtually invisible. To look away so as not to embarrass a woman was Pathan politeness.
This just could have its advantages. Boldly, she walked to the far side of the encampment and kept on walking. No one watched her; no one followed her and with relief Lily found a large sheltering rock and spent some unsupervised minutes there. When she strolled casually back she found a fire had been lit and cooking pots had been set to boil up. Two men scrambled down from the hills carrying the carcass of a sheep and this they proceeded to butcher and prepare to roast, threading the chunks of meat on to long metal skewers which they held over the flat and now red-hot fire, fragrant with juniper and apricot twigs.
Lily, almost insane with hunger as the scents of the roasting meat and herbs drifted towards her, sat apart from the group, unremarked and apparently invisible. She found a sheltered spot in the sunshine with her back to a rock and stared ahead, trying to make out where on earth they had come to. She was puzzled. All her instincts and the geographical information before her eyes told her that they were now facing and travelling south and must have done a wide loop – a detour of at least thirty miles through the hills. The land fell dramatically below them into a lush green valley stretching from east to west. ‘Wherever else we may be, that is definitely not Afghanistan,’ she concluded.